Famed 25th gets the call

But aside from a handful of peacekeeping missions that required the deployment of only small portions of the 25th--to Haiti, to Bosnia-Herzegovina--the division has not seen heavy combat since the last of its soldiers returned home from Vietnam in 1971.

The 25th Infantry's reputation as a stationary division--on the United States' westernmost border as the nation's final defense in the Pacific, particularly against North Korea--is so well known that a number of soldiers who returned from Iraq or Afghanistan quickly requested transfers to the 25th. They are arriving at Schofield Barracks, about 20 miles outside Honolulu just in time to redeploy to the region.

A visit to Schofield Barracks these days finds the division working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to prepare for a deployment that might prove to be even more complicated than that almost a year ago of the tens of thousands of soldiers who fought the first phase of the Iraq war.

One detail of the 25th's deployment is most worrisome to military leaders and can be summed up in two words: convoy ambushes. Getting thousands of troops into Iraq--at the same time the Army is rotating thousands of other soldiers out--is certain to be a logistical nightmare, particularly in light of the fact that some of the most deadly attacks on coalition forces have been carried out against traveling soldiers.

Anyone who watched early footage of the war in Iraq remembers the bottlenecked lines of Humvees and 5-ton trucks that stretched for long, exposed miles along Iraq's dusty, crude roads. The 25th Infantry will have to send a good number of its soldiers and equipment from the port in Kuwait City into Iraq in those same kind of vulnerable caravans.

Mitigating `the risk'

"It's a real concern for us. There's no pretending otherwise," said division Command Sgt. Maj. Franklin Ashe. "We have trained for it, and we will try to mitigate the risk, but the risk remains."

That training was evident on a recent afternoon in the northernmost valleys of the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Hundreds of soldiers were being trained in how to respond to an attack on their convoy: how to call in attack helicopters, how to assume fighting positions, how to respond if a grenade is thrown into their Humvee.

The most interesting part of the training wasn't that it was taking place, but who was taking part. The soldiers were not infantrymen, the rifle company soldiers traditionally on the front lines. Instead, drawing on lessons learned from attacks on support personnel such as Pfc. Jessica Lynch, those training on this sun-drenched afternoon were finance clerks usually in charge of processing Army paychecks.

"At this point everyone is equally under attack in the places where we deploy," said Maj. Stacy Bathrick, the division's spokeswoman, as she watched the live-fire training exercises, "so everyone is equally trained in how to respond to those attacks."

It was apparent how seriously the soldiers were taking their training. Before she led her squad to their Humvees for their first practice ambush, Sgt. 1st Class Carol Wright gathered everyone together and made an announcement that echoed--not because it was shouted in the usual Army fashion but because it was said very quietly, with steely calm.

"Focus on what is about to happen," she said. "Very soon this could be the real thing happening to you on some stretch of sand on the other side of the world."

Because most of the 25th Infantry will be stationed in Afghanistan, including the top command staff, the division's ranking officer in Iraq will be Col. Lloyd Miles, commander of the nearly 4,000 soldiers who make up the division's 2nd Brigade.

Miles' brigade initially will be attached to the 4th Infantry Division, the division that captured Hussein last month, in the heart of the what's called the Sunni Triangle.

The brigade later will work with the 1st Infantry Division, which will deploy to Iraq from its base in Germany in about three months.

Miles, a career officer who was on a reconnaissance mission to Tikrit when the deposed dictator was discovered nearby, jokes about being in place to watch the historic events unfold.

"I told the commanders of the 4th ID that that's how it works," he said. "You send in Miles and his guys from the 25th ID, and Saddam Hussein is immediately rounded up."

But Miles quickly turns serious when talk turns to the other things he observed during his short trip to Iraq. Two constant threats seem to pose the greatest risk to the lives of U.S. soldiers there: rocket-propelled grenades and improvised explosive devises, RPGs and IEDs in Army parlance.

"They are very clever with the IEDs they are making now," the colonel said. "They will use anything, even the most simple devices like a garage-door opener or doorbells, to make an explosive that can be and has been deadly."